It doesn't matter which you heard the holy or the broken hallellujah.

There's a Leonard Cohen line, in "First We Take Manhattan", that goes something like, "You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win.". I really like that line. I've had a few things I meant to write about this past week, but my mind has mostly been consumed by one big thing that has yet to fully resolve itself. More on that maybe. Or not. There are probably more Leonard Cohen lines that apply here.

What I downloaded from eMusic this month:
-Alex Chilton- "In The Street" (Live version)
-CunninLynguists (It's possible that I didn't misspell that in the correct incorrect way)- Dirty Acres
-Del The Funky Homosapien- Eleventh Hour
-Dinosaur Jr.- Beyond
-Fugazi - 13 Songs
-Mike Ladd- Nostalgialator
-Minor Threat- Out Of Step
-Mission of Burma- Signals, Calls & Marches
-RJD2- "Rollerskating Jam"
-Two tracks of Ursus Minor w/ Brother Ali
-Wilco- "I Must Be High" (Live)
-Matthew Sweet's cover of Big Star's "The Ballad of El Goodo"
-Paul Westerberg- "As Far As I Know"

Keith- I'm listening to "Suzanne" right now. The bit about tea and oranges that come all the way from China is in the first verse.

The post-punk 80s rock I downloaded mainly because I've started reading the book Our Band Could Be Your Life which covers those bands. The Mike Ladd thing I've never really heard of, but I'll grab anything that Def Jux releases. Alex Chilton, of course, was in Big Star, and there should be statues of him in at least three major American cities. One is Memphis, and I don't care where the other two are.

The picture is of Pushkin, because I like Pushkin.

I finally watched The Darjeeling Limited today, in between basketball games. The DVD sat in the Netflix sleeve on my desk for nearly a week before I got around to it. The movie was fine, I guess. I liked it more than the Life Aquatic, but it kind of felt like Anderson was returning to fields he already plowed with Tanenbaums, which I liked a lot more than Darjeeling. Kids, this is why it might be a mistake to begin your career with three films, two of which are nearly perfect and the other a legitimate masterpiece- you'll have a hard time staying on that plateau.

Monday night is the Brother Ali show at the Cradle. I've seen Ali twice before, and both times were special. I expect nothing less for this show. I'll probably scribble down a bunch of words about it, in no small part because at times I think Ali just might be one of the two or three best rappers of the decade.

NCAA Tournament stuff: Thursday was boring, Friday was awesome. The Tampa pod, where two twelve seeds and two thirteen seeds won in the first round is my favorite thing in sports since State beat UNC in football last year. Duke losing to Bob Huggins and West Virginia was just pure gravy. The only way this could get better would have been if Texas A&M could have held on against UCLA, or if Arkansas can somehow knock off UNC tomorrow. Which I can't envision happening. I'm really glad that I didn't fill out a bracket for a serious pool this year- I had Pitt in the Final Four. The only upsets I had were Davidson over Gonzaga and Siena over Vandy. I also might have predicted Duke to go to the Final Four, which in retrospect was a silly thing to believe.

Do you know the part of "Downtown Train" where Tom Waits rasps "I'm shining like a new dime"? He should have won a Pulitzer Prize for that moment. Doesn't matter what category. Hell, he should have won all of them. The Pulitzers are usually wasted, anyway.